taediosum: (pic#17791377)
arcade gannon ([personal profile] taediosum) wrote in [community profile] route666rp2025-06-02 09:45 am

After spending thirty years of my life hiding my association with the Enclave [open]

Who: Arcade ([personal profile] taediosum) & OPEN
What: Arts & crafts (or some long overdue vehicle maintenance)
When: Some activity during the morning stop & early evening 
Where: His truck
Warnings: TBD but nothing likely

Note: I have an opt-in here for Arcade's vital sense ability, please leave a comment if it's something you're interested in coming up here or in future threads! Otherwise, no worries, it just won't work on/around them.



[ Ordinarily, Arcade only looks for salvage of practical things, at the intermittent garage stop. He doesn't know much about vehicle maintenance beyond the basics, and even that's mostly still only in theory. (Luckily, he somehow hasn't had to field a flat tire or an overheating engine, yet.) But he knows plenty about surviving in a post-apocalyptic waste with little to live on, from place to place. He also knows too much about personally handling triage, in those same circumstances. 

So it's really no wonder it's taken him this long to start picking up things that aren't necessarily needed but still... Well, probably should have been considered, at least, a little sooner. (But he's had a whole host of other things to worry about, these past few months, unsurprisingly.)

He's already started a small collection of patchwork canvas, wherever he can find it. It's going to take a while to actually completely enclose the back of the truck, again, so that it can serve as somewhat more suitable shelter - so he'll be around crudely stitching together the various pieces of cover that he's managed to collect, thus far, both in the early morning hours and at night. He's not quite as good at sewing as he is at suturing, and it's kind of obvious.

Or maybe he's trying to flag someone down to lend a hand with actually fitting his makeshift tarp over the top of the truck's trailer— ]
Hey, do you have a minute? I could use some help, here.

[ One particular evening, he can also be found with a small collection of old paint cans, painstakingly hunted down in the latest set of ruins. He's set up alongside the truck's cab, eyeing the faded spray paint stenciled logo on the door in front of him - before unceremoniously dashing a swath of old beige paint over it.

Maybe it's because he hasn't made a plan until now to actually get rid of it (despite all the trouble it's already caused), but covering it up feels better than expected. ]
serialmurderbot: (shutdown imminent)

[personal profile] serialmurderbot 2025-06-05 01:37 pm (UTC)(link)
[Did it catch that hesitation? Yeah, but that doesn't mean it can process why. Arcade and the rest of the humans here don't usually have the kind of scanning capabilities to know that it got damaged, but humans who know it well have caught it off-guard before by reading something in its posture or expression that it didn't know was there.

... Does Arcade know it well? Weird thought. Time to ignore that.]


I already told you it looks worse than it is.

[But that's sign enough that it's capitulating. The reasons for the warnings become clear the moment it lifts the arm it's been hiding, because even with the sleeve pulled over its forearm, its hand and fingers are torn up with what has to be bite marks. The wounds are strangely bloodless, barely scabbed over and exposing not muscle and bone but metal strutwork at the core. At least some of the jagged bite marks carry up its wrist under the sleeve.]
serialmurderbot: (network)

[personal profile] serialmurderbot 2025-06-06 02:14 pm (UTC)(link)
The veins sealed and I barely lost any body mass.

[... Yeah so it's perspective on 'worse' is maybe different than most people's. It almost jerks the arm away but stops, holding stiff and not looking either at the injuries or at Arcade's face when he starts trading incredulous glances between the two.

And here it has to admit;]


I don't know how fast it will repair without a medsystem.
serialmurderbot: (ugh)

[personal profile] serialmurderbot 2025-06-07 03:41 am (UTC)(link)
[It wouldn't hurt if only SecUnit could get turning down its pain sensors to work the way that's supposed to, but instead, yeah, it kind of sucks. It's not going to say that, though. Nor is it going to talk about the time it lost basically all the organic material on its back. If this is how Arcade reacts to a chewed arm it doesn't want to see what colors his face turns at that one.

Mostly, though, it's because it's looking entirely blank about being asked what it needs. The arm drops a few centimeters.]


You can't just patch it?
Edited 2025-06-07 03:41 (UTC)
serialmurderbot: (huh what)

[personal profile] serialmurderbot 2025-06-09 10:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Fine, then do that.

[The technical term for what SecUnit's already trying out is 'ignoring the problem and hoping it won't have to deal with the consequences.' Success rate is low so far, for some reason.

But it doesn't want to lose function in the arm, and even though it suspects that it won't lose functioning, it doesn't actually know if injuries to its organic parts can... go bad, like they do for humans. It's never actually gone that long without access to a cubicle or a medsystem, which. Weird thought.]


Where do we go to sterilize things?

[It's pretty sure that's what needs to happen, right?]
serialmurderbot: (this is stupid)

[personal profile] serialmurderbot 2025-06-09 10:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I had to teach an asshole not to eat people.

[It flexes the hand, looking dispassionately down at the tooth marks, then shoves the injured hand back into the pocket of its jacket. It stops to scan Arcade's truck to make sure there's nothing left unsecured, but finding no particular stalling tactic, it follows Arcade along.

It clearly doesn't like the idea, but having been convinced that it's necessary it'll go through with it with no danger of it trying to slip off on the way.

It pauses, then adds, because surely this would be the next question;]


No, he isn't dead.
serialmurderbot: (named murder)

[personal profile] serialmurderbot 2025-06-10 04:17 am (UTC)(link)
One less, if he doesn't want to get torn apart.

[It means that. It says so in a very calm way, even - it's not making a threat to a nonexistent third party, but very certain about what it will do to fix the problem.

And maybe that's just a bit monstrous of it, too - maybe it's just that much more inhuman seeming, for saying it. So much for playing safe for the humans, Murderbot.

It still hasn't stumbled its way back into its usual discomfort as it answers the question, so it sounds like it's reporting on vehicle maintenance, not a part of its own body that still hurts, actually.]


A few days. I cleaned off the dirt but there's no decontam.